The priory began as a community of Augustinian canons at Embsay, a village a few miles to the west. In 1154, they moved to a new site in the Wharfe valley, on land granted by Alice de Romille. The setting they chose -- a bend in the River Wharfe, within what is now the Yorkshire Dales National Park -- remains one of the most photographed ecclesiastical sites in England. The canons began construction of the church that still stands, building in the sturdy local gritstone that weathers to a warm golden brown. Over the following centuries they expanded the priory with a cloister, chapter house, and domestic ranges, supported by agricultural lands and the wool trade that made many Yorkshire monasteries wealthy.

When Henry VIII's commissioners arrived to dissolve the priory, they drew a line through the building's history. The eastern portions -- the chancel, transepts, and the monks' choir -- were stripped of anything valuable and left to decay. But the nave, which had always served as the parish church for the surrounding community, was spared. This distinction between monastic and parochial use saved Bolton Priory from total destruction. The result is a building split between the living and the dead: the west end with its intact roof, pews, and stained glass functioning as a working church; the east end open to the sky, its stone arches framing clouds and the surrounding woodland. Few places in England present the Dissolution's impact so starkly.

The priory sits within the Bolton Abbey Estate, owned by the Dukes of Devonshire since the Cavendish family acquired it through marriage. The estate encompasses some 30,000 acres of the Wharfe valley and surrounding moorland, including the famous Strid -- a narrow gorge where the river compresses to a few feet wide with deadly undercurrents. The landscape around the priory has been managed for centuries, creating the kind of pastoral beauty that attracted Romantic artists. J.M.W. Turner painted the ruins, as did Thomas Girtin and Edwin Landseer. Wordsworth wrote about Bolton Abbey. The combination of ruined Gothic architecture, mature woodland, and the curving river established the priory as one of the iconic Romantic sites of northern England.

Today the priory is formally known as The Priory Church of St Mary and St Cuthbert, Bolton Abbey. It is a Grade I listed building and a member of the Greater Churches Network, welcoming more than 100,000 visitors a year. The full liturgical calendar continues -- morning prayer, evensong, communion -- as it has without interruption since the 12th century. The Bolton Priory Concert Series brings music into the nave, and the building serves as a parish church for the village of Bolton Abbey. Walking through the intact western doorway into the nave, where light falls through medieval tracery onto stone worn smooth by centuries of feet, and then stepping through the ruined crossing into the roofless chancel, is to experience eight hundred years of English religious history in a dozen paces.